*Israeli military admits "professional failures" over Gaza paramedic killings.*
This admission is such an understatement that it amounts to continued denial of the facts. The PR brigade has pulled back to the next line of defensiveness, but not all the way back to where it would confess the truth.
(satire) *Pros And Cons Of Bringing Back Extinct Species.*
(satire) *DOJ Plants Gun On Maine.* The state's population is now in jail.
*Federal judge blocks [muskrat's] effort to shutter [Consumer Financial Protection Board].*
The political philosophy of the UK Labour Party seems to be "we must convince businesses to invest here by giving them all the power they want, no matter how this puts us in danger from them."
Pope Francis allowed Vance to visit, then died the next day.
An overdose of disgust?
For the present stage of climate disaster, "The more unequal the society is, the more severe the climate disaster".
That is plausible in the short term, while the disasters are within what society can cope with if it is well organized to do so. Thus, the people who are truly crushed are the poor. Make fewer people poor, and the local climate disasters are survivable.
But that won't apply if climate disaster reaches the stage at which globalized industrial production collapses, each region is reduced to what it can produce locally, the level of technology is sinking, and most humans die.
Tunisia's dictatorship has sentenced opposition activists to decades in prison for political opposition.
It makes me very sad to see Tunisia's new-formed democracy fall into a dictatorship as bad as before.
The US measles epidemic is spreading so fast that the CDC, after being gored by the t-usk, is unable to keep up with them.
RFK defends his harmful propaganda by saying that "We can't rely simply on the vaccine. We also have to know how to treat measles." That, in itself, is true but it is also changing the subject.
If his idea is that it's good to discourage vaccination so as to ensure plenty of patients for doctors to maintain their skill, that is sick.
*The wrecker's officials create uncertainty to evade court orders rather than comply.*
Dear Lazyweb, Seeking source for simple but believable OpenGL 3D fire and smoke simulation that does not use GLES / GLSL shaders, OpenGL 1.3 only.
- "Why would you do that to yourself?" Reasons.
- "No, but here's one using Shader Language." You are not helping.
- "I know you said 3D, but here's a flat one." Again, not helping.
- "Here's someone's thesis that doesn't have runnable code." No.
Computer tools for providing commentary on Chess games are currently awful. People play over games using Stockfish, which is a useful but not terribly relevant tool, and use that as a guide for their own commentary. There are Chess Youtubers who are aren’t strong players and it’s obvious to someone even of my own mediocre playing strength (1700 on a good day) that they don’t know what they’re talking about because in many situations there’s the obvious best move which fails due to some insane computer line but they don’t even cover it because the computer thinks it’s clearly inferior. Presumably commentary I generated using Stockfish as a guide would be equally obvious to someone of a stronger playing strength than me. People have been talking about using computers to make automated commentary on Chess positions since computers started getting good at Chess, and the amount of progress made has been pathetic. I’m now going to suggest a tool which would be a good first step in that process, although it still requires a human to put together the color commentary. It would also be a fun AI project on its own merits, and possibly have a darker use which I’ll get to at the end.
There’s only one truly objective metric of how good a Chess position is, and that’s whether it’s a win, loss, or draw with perfect play. In a lost position all moves are equally bad. In a won position any move no matter how ridiculous which preserves the theoretical win is equally good. Chess commentary which was based off this sort of analysis would be insane. Most high level games would be a theoretical draw until some point deep into already lost for a human territory at which point some uninteresting move would be labeled the losing blunder because it missed out on some way of theoretically eking out a draw. Obviously such commentary wouldn’t be useful. But commentary from Stockfish isn’t much better. Stockfish commentary is how a roughly 3000 rated player feels about the position if it assumes it’s playing against an opponent of roughly equal strength. That’s a super specific type of player and not one terribly relevant to how humans might fare in a given position. It’s close enough to perfect that a lot of the aforementioned ridiculousness shows up. There are many exciting tactical positions which are ‘only’ fifteen moves or so from being done and the engine says ‘ho hum, nothing to see here, I worked it out and it’s a dead draw’. What we need for Chess commentary is a tool geared towards human play, which says something about human games.
Here’s an idea of what to build: Make an AI engine which gets inputs of position, is told the ratings of the two players, the time controls, and the time left, and gives probabilities for a win, loss, or draw. This could be trained by taking a corpus of real human games and optimizing for Brier score. Without any lookahead this approach is limited by how strong of an evaluation it can get to, but that isn’t relevant for most people. Current engines at one node are probably around 2500 or so, so it might peter out in usefulness for strong grandmaster play, but you have my permission to throw in full Stockfish evaluations as another input when writing game commentary. The limited set of human games might hurt its overall playing strength, but throwing in a bunch of engine games for training or starting with an existing one node network is likely to help a lot. That last one in particular should save a lot of training time.
For further useful information you could train a neural network on the same corpus of games to predict the probability that a player will make each of the available legal moves based on their rating and the amount of time they spend making their move. Maybe the amount of time the opponent spent making their previous move should be included as well.
With all the above information it would be easy to make useful human commentary like ‘The obvious move here is X but that’s a bad idea because of line Y which even strong players are unlikely to see’. Or ‘This position is an objective win but it’s very tricky with very little time left on the clock’. The necessary information to make those observations is available, even if writing the color commentary is a whole other layer. Maybe an LLM could be trained to do that. It may help a lot for the LLM to be able to ask for evaluations of follow-on moves.
What all the above is missing is the ability to give any useful commentary on positional themes going on in games. Baby steps. Having any of the above would be a huge improvement in the state of the art. The insight that commentary needs to take into account what different skill levels and time controls think of the situation will remain an essential one moving forward.
What I’d really like to see out of the above is better Chess instruction. There are religious wars constantly going on about what the best practical advice for lower rated players is, and the truth is we simply don’t know. When people collect data from games they come up with results like by far the best opening for lower rated players as black is the Caro-Kann, which might or might not be true but indicates that the advice given to lower rated players based on what’s theoretically best is more than a little bit dodgy.
A darker use of the above would be to make a nearly undetectable cheating engine. With the addition of it giving an output of the range of likely amounts of time the player is likely to take in a given position it could make an indistinguishable facsimile of a player of a given playing strength in real time whose only distinguishing feature is being a bit too typical/generic, and that would be easy enough to throw in bias for. In situations where it wanted to plausibly win a game against a much higher opponent it could filter out potential moves based on their practical chances in the given situation being bad. That would result in very non-Stockfish-like play and seemingly a player plausibly of that skill level happening to play particularly well that game. Good luck coming up with anti-cheat algorithms to detect that.
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers [...]
Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an "AI-powered force multiplier for public safety" that "deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels." [...]
404 Media obtained a presentation showing some of these AI characters. These include a "radicalized AI" "protest persona," which poses as a 36-year-old divorced woman who is lonely, has no children, is interested in baking, activism, and "body positivity." Another AI persona in the presentation is described as a "'Honeypot' AI Persona." Her backstory says she's a 25-year-old from Dearborn, Michigan whose parents emigrated from Yemen, and who speaks the Sanaani dialect of Arabic. The presentation also says she uses various social media apps, that she's on Telegram and Signal, and that she has US and international SMS capabilities. Other personas are a 14 year-old boy "child trafficking AI persona," an "AI pimp persona," "college protestor" [sic], "external recruiter for protests," "escorts," and "juveniles.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Before him, the most recently-canonized saints lived and died in the 1800s. Acutis is different: He had a phone! He made websites about miracles! He wore sneakers! He's "God's influencer." Supplicants see him as somehow both approachably normal and extraordinarily devout. He was reportedly "uninterested in the trappings common for a wealthy child in Milan," asking his parents to donate the money they would have spent on more designer sneakers to the poor and skipping ski trips to teach catechism instead. [...]
Coincidentally, technology is bedeviling Acutis' early days as a saint. On eBay, people are selling what they claim to be his "relics," tiny pieces of a saint's body. One anonymous seller was selling "supposedly authenticated locks of Acutis' hair that were fetching upward of 2,000 euros ($2,200 US), according to the Diocese of Assisi, before being taken down," the AP reported. "It's not just despicable, but it's also a sin," one reverend who has a tiny fragment of Acutis' hair in a chapel by his office told the AP. "Every kind of commerce over faith is a sin."
There is a lot of non-relic commerce happening at the Shrine of the Renunciation, however. It's free to enter the church, but there is a gift shop around the corner at the exit.
How about them miracles? Wikipedia:
Luciana Vianna had taken her son, Mattheus, who was born with a pancreatic defect that made eating difficult, to a prayer service. Beforehand, she had prayed a novena asking for the teenager Acutis's intercession. During the service, Mattheus had asked that he should not "throw up as much". Immediately following the service, he told his mother that he felt healed and asked for solid food when he came home. After a detailed investigation, Pope Francis confirmed the miracle's authenticity, leading to Acutis's beatification. [...]
A Costa Rican woman named Valeria had fallen off her bike and suffered a brain haemorrhage with doctors giving her a low chance of survival. Valeria's mother, Lilliana, prayed for the intercession of Acutis and visited his tomb. The same day, Valeria began to breathe independently again and was able to walk the next day with all evidence of the haemorrhage having disappeared. [...] Pope Francis presided at an Ordinary Consistory of Cardinals, which approved the canonization of 15 people, including Blessed Carlo Acutis.
Well there you have it! That's just SCIENCE.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
As a part of this project, we also re-built the floor in the Lounge bathroom, which apparently had been sealed poorly, with resulting leaks on the Men's Room ceiling downstairs. We also replaced the Lounge sink, which had seen better days (and had been fucked off the wall at least twice. Please stop fucking on the sinks, thanks.)
It is a universal law that any time a contractor opens things up (whether they are a plumber, electrician, whatever), the first thing they say is, "Wow, whoever was in here before was an idiot." You hear it every time, you get used to it. But the spaghetti mess of drainage they found under the Womens' Room floor was really quite something. There was a lot of, "Why, why in the world would you do this??" Oh, also the clean-out ports for the drains were tiled over. No wonder we couldn't find them.
I've mentioned before that I suspect the plumber we had back in 2000 was actively trying to sabotage us. His crew were all his idiot sons and nephews, and multiple times I witnessed a failson spend all day laying pipe, then at the end of the day Daddy finally looks at it and says, "That's wrong, do it again". Oh, I'm so happy to be your learning experience. Anyway, how do you draw the line between incompetence and malice with someone like that? Fuck you, Benny. It's been 25 years and I'm still holding a grudge because I'm stil dealing with the aftermath.
Anyway! Beautiful, shiny new toilets! With seats!
For those of you who sponsored a toilet and purchased naming rights, the plaques should be going up this week. Keep an eye out!
Update:
When I posted this, I said that we had managed to cover the entire cost of the project with donations, but after looking at the latest invoices... "LOL no".
My original guess was that this project would be about $25,000 in contractor labor, and then another $20,000 for the toilets themselves. Well it turns out we got the toilets for much less -- $9,800 -- but because of all the stupid bullshit they found along the way, the labor took three weeks instead of five days. This project should have been "dig up and re-tile a two foot hole under each toilet, move some pipes" but because of the plumbing insanity, it ballooned into "dig up and re-tile almost the entire floor of the Women's Room, and re-do all of the drain routing". So labor and rough materials came to a bit over $60,000. We took in $43,000 in donations earmarked for the toilet project, so donations covered 60% of the total.
Which is still amazing, don't get me wrong. Thank you all so much!
But damn, nightclubs are just a hole in the sand that you shovel money into.
The game was running but the screen was black. Then as I was moving the cabinet, I discovered that "percussive maintenance" made the screen come back on for a few seconds. So something is loose, but I can't tell what. When the monitor blacks out, the game continues playing; the LEDs are lit on the deflection board's low voltage supply; and spot killer is not active, so it's getting signal.
It's also probably not great, but probably unrelated, that to get 5v back on AR2 sense, I have to push like 5.8v. That's like 15% of the power radiating away somehow. Yes, I cleaned all the edge connectors.
Anyway, like I said last time, while I am happy to continue to sink money into these weird old artifacts so that future generations can experience them, I really need to find someone I can pay to fix them when they regularly break, because I'm not good enough at that. Help me find that person.
NOTE: Understand this request as if I were asking, "Do you have a local dentist that you like?"
If your answer is of the form, "No, but have you tried contacting the CEO of the American Dental Association? They probably know Hot Dentists In Your Area", or, "No, but most major metropolitan areas have dentists", you are not helping.
In fact, any answer that starts with "No but" or "Have you" is almost certainly not helping.
I shouldn't have to say this, but apparently I have to say this.
"It's normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you, you don't need to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.